Graduates across all majors have similar loan amounts after graduation However, payment is a heavier burden for students who graduate with degrees in arts, sports, or humanities. After graduation, salaries increase by an average of 65% in the first five years. However, non-career-oriented degrees start at much lower wages (x axis in the chart above) and thus pay a significantly higher percentage of their income in loan payments.

Educational mobility is quite low in the US, where the majority of people attain the same level of education as their parents, or worse. In other words, most people from uneducated families stay that way and vice versa.

Approximately 26% of children in households making more than $200,000 attend private schools. New Orleans has the highest percentage of children in high schools, at 25%. Click through to read the excellent, broad study of America’s private school market. The linked study does not cover charter schools, which are an important, free alternative to poor traditional public schools.

This chart shows the net domestic migration between US cities from 2011 to 2012 by educational attainment. Cities like San Francisco and Seattle gained highly educated workers while losing those with high school diplomas or less, while cities like Tampa and Atlanta gained less-educated new arrivals. Large cities like New York still gained population overall via immigration, but lost domestic population.

There were 51,008 doctoral degrees granted in the US in 2012. The top five doctoral-granting states were California, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Of these graduate students, the vast majority are American citizens.

Overall underemployment rates for recent college grads is similar to levels in the early 1990’s. The main difference, as seen in the bottom chart, is that the share of recent grads with low wage jobs has increased substantially, even though the overall rate hasn’t changed much.

There are only a handful of outlier metros that educated Americans are moving to, most notably the Bay Area and Raleigh, NC. The biggest and most well-known college towns (Ann Arbor, Ithaca, Ames, etc.) have extremely high shares of educated residents, largely due to their academic company-town environments. Click through for a searchable, interactive version.